What is Sustainability Anyway?

What Is
Sustainability, Anyway?

Introduction

Twelve years ago
this September, eight men and women said goodbye to wellwishers and walked into
Biosphere II, a 3.1-acre airtight greenhouse in the Arizona desert. The door
was sealed behind the "bionauts," a team of specialists right out of Mission: Impossible: a systems engineer, a
physician, two biologists, agricultural scientists, a computer systems expert.
They planned to remain under glass together for two years, proving that humans
could design, construct, and live in a self-sufficient ecosystem.

The project got off to a good
start and ran smoothly for several months. The $200-million enterprise
represented years of planning and the most up-to-date research into ecosystem
design and function, and the planners seemed to have thought of everything.
Like the Earth ("Biosphere I"), Biosphere II was a closed system except to
sunlight. It featured a productive mix of biomes, including miniature forests,
lakes, streams, and even an "ocean." The researchers expected to live off the
system's internal output, without additional food, oxygen, or other supplies,
throughout the experiment.

In Mission:
Impossible, the experts routinely encounter odds that seem impossible
indeed, but the operations nevertheless always go flawlessly. Biosphere II's
experts, on the other hand, were blindsided by unforeseen developments. After
18 months, oxygen concentrations had dropped from 21 percent to a marginal 14
percent, the level found at about 17,500 feet. The carbon dioxide exhaled by
the bacteria-rich soils was being absorbed and bound up in the concrete walls
of the building, so the plants couldn't break it down into carbon and free
oxygen. Other troubles, apart from friction among the human inhabitants,
included the extinction of three-quarters of the small animal species and all
of the pollinating insects. Insect life in general came to be dominated by
ants. Food plants grew poorly, but weedy vines ran wild. (Supplemental oxygen
pumped into the greenhouse kept the crew going for the full two years.)

Biosphere II was a physical
experiment in sustainability. The project scraped off all the political and
rhetorical barnacles that cling to the idea of sustainability, leaving the
essential question: How do we make a self-contained place to live, and keep it
going for a long time? The question is important because human beings are doing
many things to the planet that are, or may be, destructive to the natural
systems we depend on. But scaling the question up to the full-size real world
brings back the barnacles and makes the matter complex and ambiguous, because
of the many "it depends" questions that must be asked: For how long? For how
many people? Are they rich or poor? What are their views of other creatures?
What technologies are available? and so on.

Despite its limits, the answer
that came out of Biosphere II is valuable. Since it was just an experiment, it
would be inaccurate to say it failed; it simply yielded data. One of the things
it showed is that ecosystems are extraordinarily complex and dynamic, poorly
understood, and prone to unforeseeable behavior that may alter their
functionality. (As the saying goes, ecology isn't rocket science; it's a lot
harder.) These "wild facts" likewise color and inform everything that can be
said about living sustainably on "Biosphere I." It's not so easy to create a
robust, productive, hospitable, and long-lived life-support system, and it is
very foolish to ignorantly compromise the one we've got.

Many are tempted to ignore these
facts. Sustainability, despite being a relatively new term, has already been
overused and corrupted. For its display at the 1992 Rio Summit, for instance,
an Italian energy company chose the slogan "Sustainable Development: We're
Growing With the Planet"-apparently intending no irony and without explaining
in what way the planet itself was actually growing. Just as sustainability can
be distorted so that it considers only humans' interests, it can also be
defined in ways that force homo
sapiens out of the picture altogether-as in the views of some "deep
ecologists" who see people as a cancer on the Earth. Being human ourselves, the
authors have a viewpoint that is centered on human values and experiences. But
we have tried to strike a balance, and we argue below that to achieve true
sustainability it is both necessary and right to have a proper regard for all
living creatures.

All people and cultures try to
improve their lives and conditions; this process is often called development.
To achieve sustainability requires sustainable development, which was most
famously defined by the Brundtland Commission in 1987: roughly, the ability to
meet our needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet
theirs. It's a durable definition because it is flexible and open to
interpretation. An obvious flaw, however, is that it begs the question. Of
course people will always need food, water, and shelter to survive, but to thrive will take more than
that-and we should not presume to know, beyond certain basics, what future
generations will need to thrive. All we can be reasonably sure of is that they
will value having choices. Ultimately, sustainable development and
sustainability itself are about collective values and related choices and are
therefore a political issue, almost certainly the supreme global political
issue of this century. Because values, politics, and our understanding of the
Earth and its systems will evolve, notions of what is sustainable will never be
static.

But we have to begin somewhere.
As a big, sloppy subject, sustainability can be approached in many different,
and equally legitimate, ways. It may be convenient to think about
sustainability in terms of four dimensions-human survival, biodiversity, equity,
and life quality (see figure). Survival refers to the bare minimum conditions
required for the continued presence of the species homo sapiens on the Earth, and we start there
because without species survival, the rest is moot. This is not our main focus,
however, because human environmental blunders and excesses are not likely to
threaten us as a species.
More important are the remaining three elements, which contribute to our
survival as a species but also encompass the survival of humans as communities of individuals,
as well as the forms of human welfare we pursue-freedom, fairness, fulfillment,
and related ideas-after we're reasonably assured of survival. We make this
distinction because history offers many examples of human cultures that were
hardly fair or just but still managed to last a long time.

The four dimensions are arranged
in a layered pyramid that resembles psychologist Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of
needs. The idea is much the same: the dimensions are addressed from bottom to
top and the upper layers build on the ones below. We end by briefly describing
a core strategy for moving toward a culture of sustainability.

Human Survival

In the sci-fi
film The Matrix,
intelligent machines have bumped human beings off their self-assigned place at
the pinnacle of creation and turned them into dream-pacified energy slaves. The Matrix Reloaded, the sequel,
ends with the machines boring rapidly toward the underground city of Zion, the
last refuge of the few human rebels against the new world order. Things look
bad for the humans. (The final episode is set for release in late 2003.)

Is this scenario plausible as The
End?

Something, if not smart machines,
will no doubt kill off humanity sooner or later. The fossil record suggests
that no species lasts very long in geological terms (although the humble
cockroach, already 280 million years old, may prove the exception). A likely
assassin is an asteroid or comet, such as the one that apparently collided with
the Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Killer asteroids or parricidal
robots seem more plausible than species-cide. Doomsday literature has
traditionally fingered nuclear holocaust, runaway viruses, or environmental
crisis as likely ways we might kill ourselves off. But humans (like cockroaches)
have proven so resilient and adaptable that we have moved into nearly every
place on Earth except the oceans. And although biologists have long debated the
minimum population needed to sustain a vertebrate species for a few hundred
years, the closest thing to a standard estimate is the low thousands. Given
this relatively low number, and the adaptability and geographic dispersal of
human beings, it's hard to imagine that even the horrors just mentioned would
do more than trigger a massive eclipse of the human presence on the Earth.

So human survival as a species does not seem to be
in much danger from anything we might do to the global ecosystem, however
rapacious, stupid, and/or shortsighted. Nevertheless, the survival of billions
of individuals certainly
is. From a strictly anthropocentric point of view, the only human survival
issue that concerns sustainability is that such rapacious, stupid, and/or
shortsighted abuse of our environment will kill many people, cause profound
suffering, and devastate cultures.

The human survival dimension of
sustainability thus boils down to the question, How many people can the Earth
support? This is also the title of a rich and wide-ranging book by Rockefeller
University biologist Joel E. Cohen, who notes that people have been making such
estimates for nearly 400 years, with results that range from less than 1
billion to more than 1 trillion. Clearly, there is no simple answer except "It
depends." According to Cohen, it depends on:

the typical level of material well-being;

the distribution of material well-being;

available technology;

political institutions;

economic arrangements;

demographic arrangements;

physical, chemical, and biological environments;

how much variability
in total population is acceptable;

peoples' willingness to risk local ecological disaster;

the time horizon; and

fashions, tastes, and moral values.

Cohen's 36-page chapter reviewing
the many complex ways these factors interact to shape the number of people the
Earth can support is aptly titled "Human Choices." Carrying capacity for humans
is in large part self-defined, because the limit on human population is not the
maximum carrying capacity, but the cultural carrying capacity, which is lower.
If everyone lives at a subsistence level, the Earth will support more people
than if everyone lives at a more comfortable level that requires more
resources. The factors listed above help define the difference between the
maximum population and the optimum population.

Take "typical level of material
well-being," for example. Despite the sloganeering of Italian energy companies,
the world is finite and therefore imposes limits. If the pie ultimately cannot
be enlarged, then average material well-being will probably be greater if there
are fewer people on the planet at any one time. An adequate diet for all, for
instance, will be easier to achieve with 3 billion people than with 30 billion.
Even if the higher number were theoretically supportable, producing a decent
diet for 3 billion people would require less cultivated land, less intensive
farming, less disruption of natural ecosystems, less freshwater, and less
energy for production and transportation. In turn, that means more undisturbed
wilderness, greater biodiversity and fewer extinctions, less sprawl, less
pollution, and so on-which, beyond reducing human mortality and disease, means
the average quality of life can be higher.

But average well-being could be high and still imperil
billions if the material wealth is too unevenly distributed, as it is now. For
example, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization recently
projected that the total amount of calories available per person per day will
rise from about 2,800 today to 3,050 in 2030. However, 440 million people will
still go to bed hungry. Malnutrition and undernourishment affect survival
directly as well as by undermining health. The wealth necessary for healthcare
delivery is likewise unevenly distributed; the affluent nations spend billions
on healthcare related to overconsumption, while inexpensive vaccines against
basic diseases common in the developing world go begging for funds.

The effects of technology on
human survival, for good or ill, are even more obvious. The industrial
revolution sprang from the invention of machines that could tap fossil fuels
and unleash their enormous stores of energy. That flood of energy led in turn
to higher production and average standards of living in industrialized
countries. On the other hand, the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear power plant disaster
contaminated 150,000 square kilometers of prime farmland and significantly
reduced the region's agricultural output. A global nuclear exchange could slash
the global carrying capacity even as it reduced the population.

Lack of space prevents us from
discussing most of the other items on the list in more detail, but all have
their own effects on how many people survive, and who they are. Different
choices in these areas lead directly to vastly different outcomes. For
instance, although human population growth now seems to be moderating somewhat,
for a long time it looked as though we were lurching helplessly toward a
boom-and-bust scenario: a peak of, say, 20 billion people followed by a
cataclysmic crash that left a devastated and strife-torn planet. This
"maximum-at-one-time" option is clearly inferior to a plan to support fewer
humans at any one time, but more over the long haul, by choosing to stabilize
population at some lower level.

The choices we are making now are
placing a heavy load on the Earth's capacity to support us. By one measure, the
Ecological Footprint, we are now exceeding that capacity by about 20 percent.
The margin will widen, probably at an accelerating rate, as our numbers and
consumption rise. The increasing load will in turn drive changes, some gradual
and others abrupt, in local and regional ecosystems. These changes will
compromise our survivability. In a few instances-such as the possible collapse
of the North Atlantic current (which carries heat north from the tropics and keeps
Europe's climate temperate rather than Siberian)-our tinkerings with the
planet's machinery could have shattering effects. Both the difficulty and cost
of adapting would be high. At all scales, human survival is threatened by our
reluctance to embrace sustainability.

Biodiversity

"So careful of
the type she seems, so careless of the single life," said Tennyson of nature
and her species. A century and a half later, however, science tells us that
nature is careless with types as well. On average, a species persists for only
4 or 5 million years. It's estimated that several hundred million species have
emerged since the Earth began, and most are gone.

Nature seems not to care that
much about preserving biodiversity (the entire realm of existing species on the
Earth). Why should we?

There are two general sorts of
answer to this question. The nonutilitarian
answer is that every species is intrinsically valuable, regardless of what
humans think about it or do with it. People can be found at all points along
this spectrum of reverence for other life, from the strip-mall developer
knowingly obliterating a rare orchid in pursuit of profits, to the devout Jain
sweeping the ground ahead of him so as to avoid treading on an ant. But this
assertion carries at least some weight with most people, and rightly so: any
species can be seen as a miracle of creation, whether you believe in God,
Darwin, or both. In general, to wipe one out is certainly a tragedy and
possibly a sin (although it's hard to argue with the 1992 World Health
Organization commission that concluded, "there seems...little ground for
preserving the human immunodeficiency, smallpox, or poliomyelitis viruses,
malaria parasites, or guinea worm"). By this yardstick, sustainability means
preserving as many species as possible and only permitting one to go extinct
after the most profound reflection and debate, and for the most compelling of
reasons.

The second kind of answer is the utilitarian, or instrumental,
argument, which says that other species have value because they are useful.
Philosopher Bryan Norton identifies two types of utilitarian value, transformative value and demand value. Other species
possess transformative value if they provide occasions for us to examine,
deliberate over, and revise our own values-that is, to grow as human beings.
For instance, a hunter chasing a gazelle for his dinner might consider that the
gazelle is running for its life. The hunter might further ponder the ethics of
killing other animals so he can live, especially if he could have had rice or
lentils instead. Transformative values can be important because humans are
thinking and reflecting beings who can gain from the examined life, not just
the mindless scratching of our various itches.

Other species have demand value for humans if they are useful
in satisfying our needs and preferences. The gazelle, for example, has demand
value (as food) to the hunter. Of course this only hints at the enormous range
of biodiversity's demand values. The list of the "goods" and "services" other
species of plants, animals, and microorganisms provide merely begins with
oxygen, food, and fresh water. It also includes fuel, fiber, building
materials, drugs and medicines, adornments and decorations, nutrient recycling,
soil formation, erosion control, water control and recycling, pollination,
waste absorption and recycling, and a number of others.

In other words, other species are
indispensable as functional parts of the ecosystems we depend upon to sustain
human life. And once survival is ensured, humans seek to improve the quality of
their lives. Other species are also useful to that end, as sources of knowledge
and amusement, companionship, recreation, artistic inspiration, and so on. For
either survival or high quality of life, humans need other species. But how
many?

No one can say for sure. About
1.4 to 1.8 million species have been named, though estimates of how many
species actually exist range from 2 million to 100 million, with a best guess
of perhaps 10 million. There are over 750,000 species of insects alone, and a
quarter of a million flowering plants. Nature is the master of redundancy,
however, and not all of these are necessary for the continued functioning of
the global ecosystem. This is clear from the fossil record, which testifies
that the larger system soldiers on while most species die out, one by one, over
time. Endangered species make the same argument: their very rarity means they
are generally (though not always) unimportant to the ecosystems they inhabit.

Stretching between these two
facts-there are millions of species and some are functionally redundant-is a
vast area of uncertainty. This brings us to some key aspects of how ecosystems
work, and to the precautionary principle.

Ecology studies the most complex
systems there are and is a relatively young science. Understanding of
ecosystems is limited and still evolving. "There's a long-running debate in
ecology," says Curtis Bohlen, a professor of environmental studies at Bates
College in Maine: "Is an ecosystem something that matures over time, or is it a
random assemblage of species that happen to be occurring together at the same
time?" Ecologists' ideas have tended to shift over the last 20 years toward the
latter view, and the shift has implications: "If these creatures have just been
thrown together," says Bohlen, "maybe there's not that much to protect in terms
of the whole unit."

The story of chestnut blight
shows how major species loss can occur without compromising ecosystem function.
The chestnut blight fungus arrived in New York on imported nursery stock around
1900. It raced through the hardwood forests east of the Appalachian Mountains,
almost wiping out the American chestnut by 1950. The chestnut is a
mast-producing tree (it makes nuts) and was the most important tree in those
forests. But its devastation made almost no difference to the forests'
functionality, because several other mast-producing species, including oak,
hickory, and beech, remained abundant.

Lest this seem to give carte
blanche to developers like the one mentioned earlier, consider the analogy of
the riveted airplane. Ordinary aluminum light planes are held together by
thousands of rivets. Given engineers' passion for redundancy, many of those
rivets are probably unneeded, and drilling one out will not likely cause
serious harm. But keep subtracting rivets, and eventually some critical part
will drop off.

The analogy isn't perfect, but it
offers some important parallels to ecosystems:

Just as it may be hard to say
which rivet is the critical one, ecosystems sometimes have keystone species
whose loss can trigger the transformation of the system, even if it comes early
in the subtraction process. But it may be unclear which, if any, of the species
is a keystone. In a given ecosystem, the endangered species might be
unimportant. In another, one might be critical. Species that appear redundant
may actually have valuable but undiscovered functions.

When the wing goes, it does so
suddenly and catastrophically, and heavily stressed ecosystems occasionally do
so as well. However, they are more likely to transform from one state to a
quite different state that retains some but not all of the original species.
Ecosystems can have multiple
stable states: in effect, different identities involving different
collections of species, different levels of biological productivity, and so on.
Changes from one state to another, especially if they take place on a large
scale and we have come to rely on them in their original state, can affect the
function and habitability of an ecosystem and thus human well-being.

If the wing falls off in flight,
the damage is irreversible. Putting back the last rivet removed will not
reattach the wing. Ecosystems losing species exhibit hysteresis, says Bohlen: "In going from complex to
simple you go through one series of community types, but when going from simple
to complex you don't retrace those steps. In other words, it may be very easy
to go one direction but very hard to go the other." This has profound
implications for the human response to loss of ecosystem function, because it
is difficult or impossible to reverse the transformation. Simply restoring the
most recently lost species won't necessarily work. If such losses are serious
and widespread-as many scientists believe they already are, or will soon
be-they could gravely compromise our planetary life-support system. At minimum,
they would be extremely expensive to restore or replace. (One famous estimate
of the value of global ecosystem goods and services, by ecological economist
Robert Costanza and colleagues, yielded an estimated range of $18-62 trillion
(2001 dollars) per year. The gross world product in 2001 was $47 trillion.

A final complication is the
difficulty of predicting the course and consequences of ecosystem transformation.
Ecologists can try to make predictions, but the uncertainties are so great that
a crystal ball might do as well. As Stephen Carpenter, a freshwater ecosystem
specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written, "The future
dynamics of ecosystems are contingent on drivers that are outside the domain of
ecology, such as climate change, human demography, or globalization of trade.
[The future behavior of these drivers] may be unknown or unknowable. Therefore
the uncertainty of the ecological predictions cannot be calculated." Moreover,
people are embedded in their ecosystems and affect their development, so that
human action in response to any predictions could cause the predictions to be
wrong.

In other words, we can guess, but
we can't even tell how wild our guesses are. Carpenter adds that ecologists,
more humble than many scientists, tend to use words like "projection" and
"scenario" rather than "prediction" or "forecast," for just these reasons.

The only sensible response to
this combination of high value and high uncertainty is "First, do no harm." In
ecological terms, this is the precautionary principle: the uncertainty means we
must be really, really careful. Maverick economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
put it this way: "Our policy toward natural resources in relation to future
generations must seek to minimize regrets." That's why the current trend in the
species count-rapidly downward-is so alarming. We humans are lethal to other
species; we kill them directly, wreck their habitats, and introduce alien
species that out-compete them. The result is that species extinction rates now
vastly exceed the "natural" background rate. The rate appears to accelerate as
species' original ranges are chopped up and converted to human uses.

It may be tempting to assume
that, in 25 or 50 years when ecological knowledge has advanced far beyond
current limits, we can then safely (if not morally) destroy any species thought
to be superfluous or dangerous. Perhaps so. But human knowledge is always
imperfect, and from the utilitarian standpoint it is foolish to break or
discard a tool you might need some day. From the
aesthetic/spiritual/nonutilitarian standpoint, further knowledge is likely only
to increase the sense of awe with which we regard the natural world. Either
way, the default rule ought to be preservation.

Equity

Imagine that you
have been chosen to establish an entirely new island community, and that you
alone get to decide how to organize the society. You can pick any government,
any economic system, any division of resources that you want. The only
condition is this: your place in society will be chosen at random. Would this
change your answer? Would you choose a system in which most resources are
controlled by a few? Or would you divide resources equitably in order to ensure
your access to the community's wealth, whether you were part of the elite or
the underclass?

On that island, as on Earth, the
equitable distribution of resources plays a central role in social and
ecological health. Extreme inequity-immense disparities between rich and
poor-has grown in the past half-century, within countries as well as among
them, and now threatens the well-being of countless communities. According to
the World Institute for Development Economics Research, income inequality
increased in 48 of 73 countries surveyed between 1980 and the late 1990s. In
the United States, for example, the richest 20 percent of the population earns
46 percent of the country's income, while the poorest fifth earns 5 percent. In
Brazil, the richest fifth earns 64 percent of the country's income and the
poorest fifth earns 2 percent. This trend may be starkest in the Brazilian city
of São Paulo (population 18 million): while three million slumdwellers struggle
to survive, corporate executives commute to work in helicopters and live in
walled suburban communities to protect themselves from the increasing urban
crime.

These inequities undermine
sustainability in at least two major ways:

Health. A World Bank study of 44
developing nations revealed that infant mortality in the poorest fifth of the
population averages about twice the level in the richest fifth. The weakness of
public health infrastructures in impoverished countries (including substandard
medical care, clean water access, and sanitation) allows outbreaks of
infectious diseases, such as cholera and malaria, to spread unimpeded.
Infectious diseases killed 14.4 million people in 2000, according to the World
Health Organization (WHO). Of these deaths, three-quarters occurred in Africa
and southeast Asia, which account for only 36 percent of the world's
population.

Diseases can cripple entire
regions, as HIV/AIDS has done in sub-Saharan Africa.
Because HIV mainly targets the adult population, the epidemic has disrupted the
economic and social system by killing off thousands of farmers, educators,
laborers, and parents. AIDS has created 11 million orphans in Africa alone and
is expected to create 9 million more by 2010. And we cannot pretend that an
unstable Africa will affect only Africa: as the SARS outbreak recently
revealed, underfunded public health systems can allow the spread of new,
unknown diseases around the world. SARS turned out to be relatively containable
and benign, but it still infected about 8,500 people, killed over 800, and cost
an estimated $10-30 billion. A new bug, equivalent in lethality to the 1918-19
flu epidemic (perhaps 40 million dead) and spread around the world by jetliners
at 500 miles an hour, could be catastrophic.

Security.
Helicopter rides and gated communities may help shield the rich from the sight
of poverty, but as World Bank President James Wolfensohn noted last year, the
wall that divides the rich from the poor is imaginary. Terrorism is the reason
du jour for the need to deal with extreme inequities, because resentment is a
breeding ground for violence-whether as terrorism, crime, or military conflict.
In São Paulo, kidnapping rich executives and their family members is a growing
industry, according to news reports.

But inequity threatens the security
of the poor as well as that of the rich. Impoverished local communities are
often powerless to resist powerful government and business interests that
recklessly exploit the areas where they live for short-term gain. In the Star
Mountains rainforest of Papua New Guinea (PNG), for instance, the Ok Tedi Mine
produces 70 million tons of tailings and rock each year, which are dumped
directly into the Ok Tedi River. While the mine produces valuable metals and
accounts for 10 percent of PNG's gross domestic product (GDP), the waste
threatens over 2,000 square kilometers of the rainforest ecosystem and the
health and food security of the indigenous tribes living along the river.
Mining at Ok Tedi is enabled by a government regulation that immunizes the
company from compensation claims. This keeps costs down, at least for the
company (perversely named Sustainable Development Program Ltd.). But when the
mine closes in 2010 or so, the company will walk away, pockets bulging with
gold and other minerals, leaving the local tribes a poisoned river and a
scarred landscape.

Ok Tedi is not an isolated
tragedy; similar mining operations threaten nearly 40 percent of the world's
large, untouched forests. Yet millions of tons of minerals are discarded each
year, largely because the current economic system externalizes much of the
ecological and social cost of mining by ignoring the degradation of communities
and ecosystems, thus making it artificially cheaper to extract virgin minerals.
Yet much of the resources we use could be recycled. Between 1990 and 2000, for
example, Americans threw away 7 million tons of aluminum cans, enough to
rebuild the world's entire commercial airfleet 25 times over. But instead of
recycling discarded aluminum, which would use 95 percent less energy than
smelting virgin aluminum, new mines were gouged out of pristine ecosystems,
disrupting them and the communities that depend on them.

Inequity can also affect the
security of larger regions and even the globe in general, by forcing the poor
to overuse and degrade local environmental resources in ways that inflict
broader effects on everyone, rich or poor. Many marginalized people, struggling
with day-to-day survival, use the few resources they have inefficiently and
unsustainably. While cheap and efficient solar cookers are available for
cooking and water purification, lack of access to these or other clean sources
of energy has forced millions to rely on wood, agricultural residues, or dung.
Burning these resources contributed to 1.6 million deaths in 2000 through
exposure to indoor air pollution, according to WHO data. It also increased
deforestation, soil erosion, and depletion of farmland, further impoverishing
the inhabitants and adding to global environmental pressures and increasingly
frequent "unnatural disasters."

An example of the latter is
Hurricane Mitch, which dumped as much as two meters of rain on Central America
in 1999 and caused billions of dollars in damage. In Honduras, the damage was
worsened by the development of fragile areas, such as the conversion of
hillsides into farmland-an outcome of the fact that 90 percent of prime
farmland is owned by 10 percent of the population. Eighty-two percent of the
rural population now lives on and farms the hillsides. Such disparities amplify the effects of natural disasters, which have
become more frequent over the last 50 years. They now afflict more than 200
million people each year and have produced 25 million environmental refugees-a
number that is projected to double by 2010. Disasters also squander foreign
development aid: every dollar spent on preventive measures could save seven in
disaster recovery costs. Wiser use of these dollars could improve both the
well-being of the most marginalized and the health of the most stressed
ecosystems.

While the connection between
equity and security is clear, governments' understanding of security remains
myopically militaristic. In 2001, the world's military expenditures grew to
$839 billion, yet illiteracy could be eliminated around the world for an annual
cost of about $5 billion, clean drinking water provided for $12 billion,
starvation and malnutrition eliminated for $19 billion, and soil erosion
prevented for $24 billion. These would all go a long way toward improving
global ecological security and societal stability, yet most governments failed
to act. One notable exception was Brazil, which cut its military budget 4
percent in order to fund an ambitious anti-hunger program.

Addressing extreme poverty is
essential, but it is only half of the equity problem. As Confucius observed
2,500 years ago, "excess and deficiency are equally at fault." Too much
consumption is just as bad (or worse) for the environment as too little. Twenty
percent of the world's people, the global consumer class, consumes 70 to 80
percent of the world's resources, and their excesses are leaving the world's
ecosystems strained. The global carbon, nitrogen, and hydrological cycles have
been radically altered, as much as half the Earth's land is transformed or
degraded, and three-quarters of the world's fisheries are at capacity,
overexploited, or depleted. The disappearance due to overfishing of 90 percent
of the populations of large predatory fish is only the latest chapter in this
sorry story.

As noted earlier, human
consumption may already be drawing down resources 20 percent faster than the
Earth can renew them. Globalization is spurring a rapid increase in the size of
the global consumer class, driven by growing advertising expenditures and
widening access to consumer credit. Yet if both too much and too little access
to the world's natural and human-made wealth seem unsustainable, they are also
unnecessary. Overconsumption involves a great deal of pointless waste, which
could be eliminated. Moreover, it not only fails to proportionately improve
well-being, it often is bad for the overconsumers, as we'll see in the next
section. Attacking counterproductive overconsumption on these fronts would free
up resources for the billions of people for whom raising consumption levels is
necessary for a decent life.

Life Quality

In 2002,
advertisers spent $451 billion to convince people that they would find
happiness in the latest fad or fashion (especially the ones the advertisers
were promoting). Often they succeeded. But more and more critics are
challenging the high-consumption economic model, drawing attention to
consumerism's failure to satisfy people and to the collateral damage it causes:
declines in health, environmental quality, and social cohesion. At the heart of
this debate is the ancient and much pondered question, What is the good life?

In our view, the definitions of
sustainability and the good life are tightly interwoven. Prerequisites to both
include human survival, ecosystem health, and some degree of social equity.
Beyond those, what makes for a quality life? In defining development, the
United Nations Development Programme says that it has to do with "creating an
environment in which people can develop their full potential and lead
productive, creative lives in accord with their needs and interests." If the
consumer model is valid, perhaps this simply means building more malls and
McDonald's. However, we would invite mall- and fast-food fans to consider the
growing evidence that goods alone cannot deliver the good life-even if there
actually were enough resources to provide this lifestyle to all 6.3 billion of
us.

The United States, the richest
nation in the world, increased its per capita gross domestic product (GDP) by
92 percent between 1970 and 2000. According to this index, Americans are nearly
twice as well off now as they were 30 years ago. But GDP is blind to the social
value of economic activity and simply adds up all the recorded expenditures. So
the more spent on cleaning up toxic waste, housing prison inmates, or burning
gasoline while trapped in traffic, the better. It also ignores all the
beneficial activities not captured in the market, such as volunteer work,
unpaid childcare, and housework. Factoring in these negatives and positives-as
the NGO Redefining Progress does with its Genuine Progress Indicator
(GPI)-paints a very different picture. In the same period that the GDP shot up
92 percent, the GPI stayed nearly flat, increasing only 4 percent (see figure).
Indeed, social indicators suggest a decline
in societal well-being over the 1970-2000 period. Income inequality rose
21 percent, teen suicides jumped 33 percent to 7.9 per 100,000 per year, and
the number of Americans without health care increased from 11 percent to 14
percent of the population to a total of 40 million, according to the Fordham
Index of Social Health. This index, which tracks 16 indicators, has declined 29
percent from 1970 to 2000.

The growth of total economic
activity at the expense of social health reflects societal priorities, that is,
the valuing of increased private consumption at the expense of essential public
goods. John Kenneth Galbraith warned of this shift in 1958 in his ironically
titled book The Affluent Society.
In the United States, "public squalor," such as the weakening of the education
and healthcare systems, paralleled rising private affluence.

This change turned out to be part
of a larger societal shift that led to the conversion of the United States into
the "consumer republic" it is today. Harvard professor Lizbeth Cohen argues
that the transformation began with the mobilization of the post-World War II
economy for domestic consumption and has climaxed with the current almost
pathological fixation on ever increasing consumption, even at the expense of
personal and social well-being-a condition many critics term "affluenza."

In the United States, affluenza
is reflected in its many symptoms:

High
levels of debt. In 2000, the average U.S. household held $7,500 in
credit card debt, and over a million Americans filed for bankruptcy.

Increasing
work stress. The average American works more hours than people in any
other nation, and more of these hours fall on nights and weekends, disrupting
sleep schedules and reducing time available with family and friends.

Declining
physical health. Overweight and obesity, abetted by poor diet and
sedentary lifestyles, now affect 61 percent of the adult population and
contributed to 300,000 deaths in 2001-second only to tobacco.

Affluenza is not confined to the
United States. Through the promotion of staple consumer products like
cigarettes and Coca-Cola, it is compromising the health and well-being of
billions worldwide. Lifestyle diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases and cancers,
caused more than 42 percent of the 55.7 million deaths in 2000. These diseases
weighed disproportionately on the industrial world, where consumption levels
are highest. According to a WHO analysis, smoking contributed to 4.9 million
deaths in 2000, overweight and obesity to 2.6 million, and physical inactivity
to 1.9 million. About half of all these deaths occurred in industrial nations,
even though they accounted for just 24 percent of total deaths and 22 percent
of the global population.

But aren't these just acceptable
side-effects of a culture that, overall, most people find deeply satisfying?
Nearly 30 years ago, research by economist Richard Easterlin led him to
conclude that "economic growth does not raise society to some ultimate state of
plenty. Rather, the economic growth process itself engenders ever-growing wants
that lead it ever onward." Since then, psychologists have extended this
thinking in studies of the sources of human contentment, which reveal that once
basic needs are met, wealth improves life satisfaction very little. This
finding holds true both at the individual and national levels and is due mainly
to constantly shifting perceptions of "needs." While telephones, air
conditioners, and automobiles have been around for an eyeblink of history, they
already have the feel of necessities (at least for those who own them).

The most affluent often don't
even realize they're rich. According to the 2002 RoperASW survey "Affluent
Americans and Their Money," only 20 percent of a sample of 1,767 Americans in
households earning over $75,000 considered themselves "affluent." Fifty-eight
percent were at least $100,000 in debt and 85 percent of them worried about
money at least occasionally (40 percent worry "all the time"). More than three
out of four said they'd need at least a million dollars to consider themselves
affluent. This group, the most affluent 24 percent of the richest country in
the world, seems still unsatisfied with their wealth. Even if one achieves
sudden and overwhelming wealth, it doesn't seem to help; psychological studies
of lottery winners reveal that they adapt to their new levels of affluence,
settling back to original levels of satisfaction after an initial burst of
euphoria.

If the sense of affluence is so
ephemeral, perhaps the consumer model, which promises satisfaction through
increased consumption, is not the best path to a quality life-especially if its
effects on social health and the environment are considered. This is not to say
that there are no benefits to the consumer society. But there are alternative
models that may help redirect society towards a more satisfying, equitable, and
ecologically harmonious path.

Reducing the public squalor that
Galbraith long ago warned of would significantly improve the life quality of
millions. In the United States and France, child poverty rates are both about
25 percent. However, after government-provided payments and services are
factored in, child poverty drops to 7 percent in France, while in the United
States it remains at over 20 percent. While these statistics highlight a
serious equity issue, when one in five children lacks adequate nutrition,
healthcare, and education-when basic needs are not met-it becomes a life
quality issue as well.

Sweden, which has been ranked as
the most equitable nation in the world, may also provide some insights. Rather
than unrestrained private affluence, Swedish social policy emphasizes public
goods, providing universal health care, generous unemployment benefits, and
practically free university education. Sweden uses significantly more resources
than the global average, but its per-capita ecological footprint is still 31
percent smaller than the U.S. footprint, even though Swedes' standard of living
is at least as high (perhaps higher, if measures of social health are
included). Critics may rage that public goods depend on government spending and
thus on taxation. But as New York
Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently explained, there would probably
be less revulsion if the word "services" replaced "taxes." Since all people,
rich or poor, have access to public services (unlike private wealth), slogans
like "read my lips, no new services" might be sneered rather than cheered.

Another lesson comes from the
villages of Sri Lanka. Started in one village in 1958, the Sarvodaya Shramadana
movement has now spread to over 12,000 (more than half the villages in Sri
Lanka). Organized around an ideal of "no poverty, no affluence," villagers work
mutually to provide not just for their communities' most basic needs, but also
opportunities to live lives they value, improving education, healthcare
services, and environmental quality.

Sarvodaya and its philosophy of
sufficiency and shared labor may provide a model for both individuals and
nations as they choose a development path. The consumer model is just one path
among many. Considering there are multiple paths to fulfillment and consumerism
is so ecologically costly, maybe we should look more closely at the examples of
living sufficiently that Sarvodaya and Sweden offer. Sufficiency is a lesson
that has been taught at least since the 3rd century BCE, when Lao-Tzu mused
that "he who knows he has enough is rich." Perhaps it is time to reawaken this
wisdom.

Conclusion

We began with a
story about the fate of an isolated habitat, and we end with another that may
also be familiar to many readers. Easter Island is a speck of land in the
Pacific Ocean 2,000 miles off the Chilean coast. This remote place and its
people have been intensely studied for years, for Easter Island today bears
little resemblance to the island settled by voyaging Polynesians over 1,500
years ago. The island's dramatic story tells us a great deal about
sustainability.

When the new arrivals beached
their ocean-going canoes, they found a lushly forested place offering several
valuable tree species, including large palms suitable for building canoes and
timber-framed dwellings. For food, the settlers had brought chickens
(deliberately) and rats (inadvertently), but the island also teemed with edible
birds. Dolphins, seals, and the crops typical of Polynesian culture-bananas,
taro, sweet potatoes, and sugarcane-rounded out the settlers' diet. They
thrived on the island's abundance and their numbers eventually grew to perhaps
7,000 (20,000, by some estimates). A sophisticated hierarchical culture
emerged, wealthy and organized enough to produce the island's remarkable stone
statues. Hundreds of these sculptures were carved over the centuries, and more
than 200, some weighing over 80 tons, were raised up onto stone pedestals.

But the Easter Islanders' success
triggered their undoing. Generations of harvesting trees for building, making
rope, and for fuelwood-and of seed-eating by the stowaway rats-led to complete
deforestation. (When the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen first saw Easter Island
in 1722, it was a shrubby grassland.) The spiraling competition among clans to
build and raise ever-larger stone statues, which required a lot of timber for
rollers and other simple machines, took a particularly heavy toll. Pollen
analysis suggests that the last of the great palms was cut down around 1400.
Bird nesting grounds were destroyed along with the forest; that and direct
consumption drove every native landbird species to extinction. As the trees
disappeared, so did the means to build the traditional big canoes. Fish and
dolphins from deeper offshore waters could no longer be harvested (and escape
or migration to other islands became impossible). Firewood supplies dwindled
and streams dried up. Soils eroded and became less fertile.

In short, the island's carrying
capacity plummeted. Food surpluses disappeared, leading to cannibalism. With
the surpluses went social complexity. Eventually the population crashed by 75
to 90 percent and the culture devolved. Roggeveen found perhaps 2,000 people on
the island, living in "singular poverty."

As Jared Diamond, Clive Ponting,
and other writers have observed, Easter Island is a potent warning. Four
lessons seem obvious:

Human beings respond strongly
to incentives to overuse resources. During most of our evolutionary history, everything
we needed was abundant. We seem wired to use it up and find something else
rather than regulate ourselves to stretch and conserve resources over long
periods.

We have great difficulty
noticing when things are going wrong, unless it happens over relatively short
periods. Gradual changes, even if noticed, are likely to be shrugged off and
adapted to. Bounty is taken for granted, especially by those societies (such as
the rich North) in which the hallucination of limitless wealth is sustained by
importing carrying capacity from elsewhere. But the Easter Islanders didn't
have the illusory comfort of imports, and they still drove their culture into
the ground. Social patterns and ways of perception die hard. As Diamond has
written, by the time the last tree was cut, trees would have been scarce for
many years and nobody would have thought it alarming.

Declining resource availability
can undermine the very organizational structures and capacities needed to
fashion a response. This is crucial: as noted above, we are well suited
biologically to perceiving and responding to short-term threats but not to
long-term ones. Culture, including our social organizations, social learning,
science, and politics, is our only defense against the latter.

The failure of the Easter
Island culture to grasp what was happening to it led, not to its extinction,
but to its radical impoverishment and simplification-in terms of numbers,
capacity to act, biodiversity, wealth, and cultural richness.

Was Easter Island culture sustainable?
People still live there, after all. The answer isn't worth quibbling over; it
simply hinges on one's definition of sustainability. If it incorporates (as the
authors' does) the notion that human communities and cultures should thrive and
not just survive, Easter Island fails the sustainability test. The islanders'
unwitting assault on the foundation of their tropical paradise led implacably
to the loss of biodiversity and life quality (and possibly equity too, but not
enough is known of the social structure to say) as the island's ecosystem was
simplified.

There is no particular reason
that this process cannot repeat itself on a global scale. In fact, that is
precisely what seems to be happening. Unlike the islanders, however, we have no
excuses. We can't plead ignorance-Easter Island and many other examples show
clearly what happens to cultures that are incautious about natural
constraints-or blindness: our science enables us to see changes that are
imperceptible to a single generation. (Science will also improve our meager
understanding of the immensely complex natural systems we live in and lead to
improved quantitative measures of sustainability.)

Most important, we know that a
sustainable global human society is imperative and what must be done to move
toward it. In this context what usually comes to mind are familiar solutions
such as solar, wind, and hydrogen energy technologies; habitat and species
protection; control of our own consumption and population-all of which
environmentalists have been urging for years. These share a deference to the
cyclical character of the Earth's systems and the need to harmonize the human
economy with them. Since the industrial revolution, we have increasingly
ignored or altered the natural cycles-carbon, nitrogen, hydrological-that
replenish these systems. The resulting explosion in economic output has come at
the cost of the long-term and dangerous depletion of natural capital. The costs
by now are as familiar as the solutions: by relying heavily on nitrogen fertilizer
instead of organic farm waste, for instance, we have reduced the fertility of
agricultural lands and created enormous dead zones in our oceans and rivers.
Our vast and accelerating logging operations and ubiquitous dependence on
fossil fuels have increased atmospheric carbon concentrations to levels never
seen before. By diverting or damming rivers, we've dried out seas (or created
new ones), changed local weather patterns, and disrupted entire ecosystems.

We know this cannot go on.
Returning to a cyclical system-harvesting renewable resources sustainably,
reusing and recycling materials in preference to mining virgin ones, rebuilding
and nurturing agricultural soils, weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels, and so
on-along with respectful husbanding of biodiversity, will start us down the
path of material sustainability. Giving due and purposeful attention to the
inequities that lock billions into wretched poverty and undermine the security
of all will start us toward social sustainability.

Together these movements amount
to a revolution. Those opposed to change may cast this future as one of short
rations, belt-tightening, and general deprivation. On the contrary, thriving
human communities such as those that have embraced the Sarvodaya principles, as
well as millions of individuals the world over who have adopted sufficiency as
their touchstone, are proof that human well-being, connection, and contentment
are achievable without consumerism, mass advertising, planned obsolescence,
heedless and destructive waste, or the endless pursuit of profits-and without a
single trip to the mall.

Only the prospect of a truly
sustainable culture offers the universal possibility of human fulfillment. It
is the business-as-usual course that leads inexorably to a sad future of
inequity, strife, natural and economic impoverishment, suffering, and cultural
decline-a future made all the more bitter by the knowledge of superior choices
foregone and forever lost.

Thomas Prugh is
Senior Editor and Erik
Assadourian is a Staff Researcher
at Worldwatch Institute.